But in the library of the
old mansion on the Appomattox, in which he passed his forming years,
there was a "wagon-load" of what he terms "French infidelity," though
it appears there were almost as many volumes of Hobbes, Shaftesbury,
Collins, Hume, and Gibbon, as there were of Diderot, D'Alembert,
Helvetius, and Voltaire. These works he read in boyhood; and when he
came to mingle among men, he found that the opinions of such authors
prevailed in the circles which he most frequented. Just as he, a
natural tory, caught some tincture of republicanism from Jefferson and
his friends, so he, the natural believer, adopted the fashion of
scepticism, which then ruled the leading minds of all lands; and just
as he lapsed back into toryism when the spell which drew him away from
it had spent its force, so he became, in the decline of his powers, a
prey to religious terrors. For twenty-two years, as we have said, he
held aloof from religion, its ministers, and its temples. The disease
that preyed upon him so sharpened his temper, and so perverted his
perceptions of character, that, one after another, he alienated all
the friends and relations with whom he ought to have lived; and he
often found himself, between the sessions of Congress, the sole white
tenant of his lonely house at Roanoke,--the sick and solitary
patriarch of a family of three hundred persons.
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